SUMMER 2021 - VOL. XXX Issue CXIII

Poe Park, Coming of Age By Carol Aaron, [email protected] When I was growing up in popular songs of the sixties. The Bronx, the go-to place to Sometimes, a group of us socialize in the summer was would visit Poe’s house, and Poe Park. Located a short bus then eagerly make our way ride, or long walk, away from towards the bandstand. my apartment, it was a mecca Circling the grassy area for teens, who congregated containing the bandstand was there to listen to music and a concrete path, filled with park meet and greet. benches. Elderly neighborhood Edgar Allan Poe spent ladies, wearing coats despite the last years of his life, from the warmth and clutching vinyl 1846 to 1849, in The Bronx handbags, and sometimes older living in what became Poe men, would perch on these Cottage, a museum of sorts. A benches, regularly commenting small wooden farmhouse, built on the youth parading in front about 1812, the cottage once of them. Many of these folks commanded an unobstructed Poe Park Gazebo were hard of hearing and their view over the rolling Bronx comments could be overheard. hills. It was a bucolic setting, in which the author “Isn’t she sweet? Hope that cute guy in the red penned his most enduring works, including Annabel shirt goes for her.” Lee, The Bells, and Eureka. “That one over there looks just like Elizabeth In April, 1844, Poe and his wife Virginia moved Taylor.” to The Bronx. Virginia was ill, and Poe hoped that A lady replied with a sniff and toss of her head, the country air would rescue her failing health. “That one, that Elizabeth Taylor. She stole Eddie Unfortunately, she died of tuberculosis in January Fisher right out from under the nose of Debby of 1847. Poe himself died two years later under Reynolds,” she stated, commenting on the headlines mysterious circumstances in Baltimore, Maryland. of those days. Those types of remarks made me smile. The cottage, no longer Hollywood divorces were in the country, was set a good topic for gossip in on the outskirts of the the early sixties. park, an oasis of greenery Looking at a passing in a very urban location, girl, another lady would surrounded by stores and comment loudly. (She apartment buildings. A too was hard of hearing.) bandstand was set up in the “Her skirt is too tight. middle of Poe Park, where How could her mother let on Wednesday nights in her out of the house like summer, a band played the that?” These voyeurs were

Poe Cottage continued on page 25 From The Editors . . . Clinton ‘61 Taft ‘62 To give the children of The Bronx a fun portal to playful learning, the Bronx Children Museum will open its doors in late 2021. The Museum is one of few cultural institutions in The Bronx geared toward young children, especially those children and families who cannot afford (or would not normally visit) a museum. The Bronx has 1.3 million residents. It is larger than Boston, has 250,000 children under the age of nine years, and is the only borough in New York City without a children’s museum facility.

Currently a “museum without walls”, BxCM serves almost 18,000 Bronx residents annually. Through innovative mobile programming, Bronx Children’s Museum, exterior BxCM engages children and adults in the arts and sciences, using its bus as a roving learning environment. The Museum also has temporary exhibits and ongoing after-school and summer programming throughout the borough at community-based organizations, schools, shelters, libraries, local festivals, and parks. The Musuem will serve nearly 75,000 children each year and will feature bright, open exhibit spaces; age-appropriate permanent and temporary interactive exhibits exploring the richness of The Bronx in the arts, culture, community, natural resources, greening, and energy; flexible studio space for community gatherings and Bronx Children’s Museum, interior meetings; and offices for Bronx Children Museum staff.

A major renovation project at a New York City landmark which was halted due to the coronavirus pandemic is back on. The plan includes restoring history while investing in the future of the beach at Pelham Bay Park. The sun has been shining over Orchard Beach, The Bronx’s only public beach, which environmental leaders who studied the water quality in 204 beaches along the Long Island Sound have listed in the top 10. But opposite the view of the Long Island Sound is a bit of an eyesore. The deteriorating pavilion has been mostly closed to the public for years. A restoration has been the mission of Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., who grew up going to the beach, the so-called “Bronx Riviera”. He has been trying to restore this piece of area history, which was built in the 1930s, but it took years to raise the $75 million needed. Orchard Beach Pavilion Diaz has allocated nearly $25 million of capital funding into this project, for which the city’s Parks Publishers & Editors Steven M. Samtur Clinton ‘61 Susan J. Samtur Taft ‘62 Department and Economic Development Corporation are Contributing Editors Adam Samtur partnering. After a pause due to COVID-19, and Barbara Fasciani Roosevelt ‘65 P.O. Box 141H Martin Jackson Science ‘58 time spent getting approval from the New York Scarsdale, NY 10583 Sandra Zuckerman Jefferson ‘57 City Landmarks Preservation Commission (the site Tel: 914-592-1647 Paula DeMarta Mastroianni was designated a city landmark in 2006), the designers, Fax: 914-725-2620 Anton Evangelista www.backinthebronx.com John Galasso Marvel Architects, can now move forward. Changes Ed Bauccio A number of the photographs in Anne Bauccio include ramps for easy access to the beach, and also the Back In THE BRONX are courtesy of and available Art & Production: Case Aiken return of concessions. Diaz said he pictures stores, an from the Bronx Historical Society. event space, and restaurants to bring people to the beach Printing Inland Printing Woodbury, NY year-round. Construction is set to start next spring and Any submissions of stories, letters, photos, and/or videos will be accepted only with Back In THE BRONX magazine having the non-exclusive rights to publish in its magazine take about two years, so expect to see the entire vision and/or in reprints and anthologies and/or in future books containing the compilation of previous magazine issues, and/or in any current or future DVD, and in any Back In THE come to life in 2024. BRONX publications.

continued on page 31 2 Reminiscing Weatherproof Halloween By Ann S. Epstein, [email protected] The brick apartment building where I grew up man with reverence as a “pharmacist”, although she in the 1950s was typical of the Norwood section of complained about his prices. The candy stores that The Bronx. We lived at 3405 Putnam Place. Our anchored the other three corners all sold more than neighborhood was populated by immigrants and their candy, and we frequented each for different reasons. descendants, primarily Eastern European and Russian I didn’t visit the one on the northeast corner until I Jews, and Irish and Italian Catholics. The emphasis bought my first pack of cigarettes, Newport Menthol, was on assimilation; despite being well that is, slipping into below the then-legal the mainstream of age of 17. American life. For The store on the Jewish kids like me, that northwest corner was included celebrating good for emergency Halloween and going school supplies like trick-or-treating. We Eberhard Faber were ignorant of its Erasers. But our Christian origins. go-to store, on the To us, Halloween southwest corner, was was as American as Lapin’s, the source of Thanksgiving, the other mint chocolate chip American fall holiday ice cream cones with that didn’t entail chocolate sprinkles, foreign rituals, spicy thick and salt-coated foods, or a language Rold Gold pretzels that the adults spoke which our grimy hands when they didn’t want 3405 Putnam Place pulled from a jar, and their children and grandchildren to understand what pastel-colored sugar dots on a paper strip whose they were saying. residual backing stuck to our tongues. Lapin’s also Decades later, when I watched the movie E.T., sold the new Spalding pink rubber balls, whose high listened to forecasts, or worried about my daughter bounce our motor reflexes had to adjust to after weeks (and now my grandsons) traversing our Midwestern of using our half-dead old ones. neighborhood on Halloween, I marveled that On the other side of Gun Hill Road was Sam’s concerns about safety and the weather played no part Appetizing, which reeked of lox, herring, and whole in my Bronx childhood. With six floors, and eleven smoked white fish with bulging eyes, and where we apartments per floor, there were plenty of doors for us fished in a barrel for five-cent pickles.Harry’s Shoes to knock on without stepping outside. Moreover, we was where our mothers took us for sturdy footwear traveled in secure packs. Fourteen elementary-aged before we became style-conscious and upgraded to children lived in the building. So, just as there was the children’s shoe department at Alexander’s on always at least one kid around to play with, there was Fordham Road. always a group to trick-or-treat with. This situation Our side of the main drag was home to the green was especially fortunate because our short street, grocer, whose produce we supplemented with goods Putnam Place, had few other options for importuning from Charlie’s wooden cart, whose bedraggled horse people to give us a treat. made its weary rounds from spring to fall. The deli, North of our building were the stores lining Gun owned by another Sam, sold the stuffed potato knishes Hill Road. The corner drugstore was owned by the I much preferred to pickles as an after-school snack father of my sixth-floor friends. In our otherwise when I could afford them. In the middle of the long working-class neighborhood, my mother spoke of this block was Dave the butcher, who was the father of my

3 Reminiscing classmate (who served steak at her birthday party!) out in moms’ dresses and costume jewelry. Crowns, and whose assistant, Benny, saved the Jewish Daily always handmade, were created with construction Forward for my grandmother, who lived with us, and paper, Crayola crayons, and glitter from the Five-and- delivered the used paper, slightly blood-stained, along Ten on Jerome Avenue. with the brisket. Like children of any era, we had our favorite South of our building was Reservoir Oval, a.k.a. candies, and those we trashed as soon as we got “the Oval,” where we played hopscotch and rode our home. Among the best were Cherry Tootsie Pops, bikes around the street-level tier, and either took the Milky Ways, and Raisinets. So bad they weren’t even stairs or trail-blazed down the hill of forsythia bushes tradeable were Turkish Taffy, Good and Plenty, and to the playground below. In a secluded “grown-up” Brach’s Mints. “Older” boys (grades 4 to 6) claimed area, old men played chess, but invited us to watch and to like Atomic Fireballs, but I never saw a boy eat one, tried to explain the rules. The park’s only off-limits not even on a dare. spots were the water fountain and wading pool, where I don’t know what my grandmother, an Orthodox polio threatened in the days before the Salk vaccine. Jew, thought of Halloween or about me and my brother Across from our apartment building, on the east trick-or-treating. Unlike a number of families in our side of the street, was a rundown single-family house, generation and a growing number in subsequent ones, rumored to be inhabited by our Bronx equivalent of we never celebrated Christian holidays like Christmas Boo Radley. We called him “Barky.” He was said to or Easter. Our kitchen and our observances were strictly have a wife and son, but I don’t remember a student kosher. While other Jewish families in my building, at P.S. 94 identified as and the neighborhood as “Barky’s kid”, nor do I a whole, may have been recall every seeing Barky less observant than ours, or his spouse. For all I they too did not display know, the house had been “Chanukah bushes” abandoned years earlier. or colored lights, nor Given the sparse did anyone other than Halloween pickings Catholic kids dye eggs in three directions, or receive Easter baskets. we could have headed Perhaps what made west one block to Halloween acceptable to Tryon Avenue, which Jews, other than its being offered more buildings, an American tradition, including those where was that a central part our classmates lived. Reservoir Oval, 1953. of the holiday was Yet we never did. Why Author in front row, left (with bare knees) collecting money for bother when we could take the elevator up to our UNICEF. This practice was in keeping with the Jewish building’s sixth floor and tramp down a flight at a time, commandments of Tikkun Olam (“healing the world”) without the wind or rain mussing our costumes? The and tzedakah (charitable giving). The UNICEF drive same logic applied to the kids who lived in those other was a school-wide endeavor. A few days before apartment buildings. On the night of October 31st, no October 31st, teachers distributed “Trick-or-Treat for one from outside our building came to Putnam Place. UNICEF” boxes, which were the size of the single- If store-bought costumes existed then, we never serving milk cartons given out in the lunchroom, heard of them. Ours were homemade. I don’t recall and had a slit on top for coins. When we knocked any of us dressing up as witches, monsters, or other on a door, we specifically said, “Trick-or-Treat for scary creatures. Perhaps we feared frightening our UNICEF” and held out our boxes to collect money benefactors, or ourselves. Boys went as cowboys before opening our hand-decorated brown grocery if they had fringed vests, holsters with a pair of six bags for candy. The following day, each classroom guns, and cowboy hats. (Dad’s work hat would do in tallied its donations, and the school awarded a prize to a pinch.) Another option was to be a baseball player the class that had collected the most. I don’t recall what by donning a cap and hanging a glove from one’s belt the prize was. The students certainly didn’t need more loop, leaving one’s hands free to haul home the loot. sugary treats. Perhaps it was simply the recognition Girls were Tinkerbell, Cinderella, or princesses decked of having excelled at “doing good”. continued on page 22 4 Reminiscing The Day I Made Officer Joe Bolton Laugh By Jimmy Newell, [email protected] On an ordinary late summer Tuesday afternoon, Freedomland was the World’s Fair for The Bronx, and my mother called down to me from our second- just walking around was a treat for an eleven-year-old story apartment at 1261 Leland Avenue. She asked boy or girl. me to come upstairs. This was certainly not an Freedomland allowed us to see the America unusual occurrence for me where Elsie The Cow had a or any of my friends on Boudoir; I could assist the Leland Avenue. Mothers, Chicago Fire Department and sometimes fathers, put out the fire that had frequently summoned us been started by Mrs. home for one reason or O’Leary’s cow. (What another. was it with cows!?) Later, But this request from we would experience a my mother turned out to western gunfight and a be a very special request, Civil War battle. But the leading to a very special best was coming, and I event. didn’t even know what lay As soon as I got to the ahead. landing outside Apartment There were plenty of Six, my mother was waiting Freedomland, USA rides to experience and there for me and looking ready to go somewhere. She arcade games to play. I especially enjoyed driving the had her hat on and was carrying her purse. I couldn’t antique automobiles and walking into the spaceship imagine where she was going or why I had to come that actually served as a radio station for WABC, who upstairs to find out. My curiosity soon was abated played all our favorite songs. as she proceeded to tell me that we were going to As usual, my mother packed a lunch, and she would Freedomland! let me get a soda. Whenever I was at Freedomland, Now, we had been to Freeedomland several I made sure to get an A&W Root Beer, which was times, but never on a Tuesday afternoon and never terrific. Don’t get me wrong, I still loved Dad’s and without my father joining us. My mother reassured me Hire’s Root Beer, but you could only get A&W at that he would be joining us later in the evening when Freedomland. he got home from work. My father worked for Con After lunch, we proceeded on our trek across Ed at their Hunts Point plant, so it was a short ride America. As we got closer to the Monorail ride, which to Freedomland that was only made to seem long by was more of a Wild Mouse than an actual monorail, the traffic he undoubtedly would encounter. we saw a sign for a show that was going to be put on Not thinking about my father’s commuting woes by Officer Joe Bolton. The sign indicated that the first at the moment, my mother and I proceeded on our show would be at 3:00 PM. That was in ten minutes. journey. As we walked on Westchester Avenue and Officer Joe was a favorite of mine for as long crossed White Plains Road, the number six trains as I could remember. He was the host of Our Gang rumbled overhead on the El. We were so used to the Comedy, and then he was the host of The Three sound of the trains, the noise hardly interrupted our Stooges. More recently, he was the host of the Dick discussion and never kept us awake at night. Tracy Cartoon Show. Only now, he was Chief Joe Crossing Hugh Grant Circle, we approached the Bolton! Way to go, Officer Joe! entrance to the Parkchester station. From there, it was My mother and I entered the small arena set aside a hop, skip, and a jump to Pelham Bay Park and the for the show. Officer Joe came out and put on a great bus to Freedomland. show, making me laugh quite a few times. Towards In no time, we were entering the gates to America. the end, he asked if anyone in the audience knew the

5 Reminiscing theme song to Our Gang Comedy and could whistle it. I knew the song, and I could whistle it in my sleep, but I wasn’t going up there and risking looking silly by getting stage-fright and blowing it. My mother glanced down at me, almost with a look of disappointment. As we left the arena, she said, “You know that song, and you can whistle it, can’t you?” I admitted that I could, and she said, “Then why don’t we come back for the second show?” My mother had challenged me to make her proud, so what could I do? An hour later, we came back to the arena, and sure enough, Officer Joe put on the same show, but he had a little twist that he hadn’t done in the first. When he got to the point of the show when he asked if there was anyone who knew the theme song, Officer Joe Bolton I jumped up and ran to the stage. Officer Joe was said. “Okay, Jimmy, are you ready to whistle the theme a terrific guy and was so friendly and welcoming. song to Our Gang Comedy?” He asked me my name, and when I told him, he I said I was, and I stood at the microphone, proceeding to whistle. This was when Officer Joe got sneaky. As I started whistling, Officer Joe pulled out a lemon and got right into my face, trying to make me goof up. I wouldn’t have it, and I started walking around the mic while I kept whistling. The closer Officer Joe got, the quicker I walked around that microphone. Finally, Officer Joe Bolton laughed out loud and patted me on the back, congratulating me for my beautiful rendition of the song in the face of a sour lemon. For my efforts, Officer Joe awarded me a Dick Tracy Transistor Radio. But my real reward was making Officer Joe laugh, which I thought was the least I could do after all the joy he had brought me and my friends watching Channel 11.

Take a drive on today’s streets of The Bronx

Look up a photo of your building in The Bronx

6 Reminiscing The Underworld Knocks at the Alhambra By Marc Estrin, [email protected] The Alhambra! The great red palace in Grenada? an elevator alternative, splendid marble steps only “A pearl set in emeralds”, as to the Moorish poets? slightly eroded in the middle of their treads. No, actually it was an apartment building on Pelham For the kids, elevator up, and steps and bannisters Parkway between Wallace and Holland Avenues. down. For the seltzer man, with that extra bottle of And far from being a residence for Muslim sultans, U-Bet Chocolate syrup, the elevator both up and or after the Christian Reconquista in 1492, a home down. At the Alhambra, the lower-lower-middle-class for Ferdinand and Isabella (who not only gave us became the lower-middle class. Columbus Day, but Inside each of the also the Alhambra four apartments to a Decree, which kicked floor, there were no dim the Jews out of Spain), hallways connecting the Alhambra became small rooms, but a large the snazziest apartment foyer leading out to complex south of spacious rooms. In the the parkway, a 1927 kitchen, refrigerators beauty which didn’t had replaced ice boxes, know nothing from the and incinerator chutes economic collapse and allowed garbage to fall Great Depression just freely down, right to around the corner. the furnace, and finally A luxury apartment out to garbage cans as it was, a Dakota ash. wannabe, lofting high Those cans and above green parkland, Alhambra Gardens, 750-760 Pelham Parkway their contents were built by rich Jews (Springstein and Goldhammer) for wrangled below by John, the “Super”, who lived in the a cool million bucks, near good schools and the IRT, cellar, had a German accent during the Second World in walking distance from Bronx Park, The Bronx War, and smelled perpetually of beer. Beer, German, Zoo, and the Botanical Gardens, it called to the once- dark cellar, furnace. It was a wonder he wasn’t lynched huddled, largely Jewish masses yearning to be free by the Jewish tenants who lived above him. from the Lower East Side, called them to trade looking The cellar itself was a mysterious, and more than out on laundry lines and street carts for views of the semi-scary, place for building and neighborhood kids parkway, or of a manicured garden with a fountain at to explore. It was the laundry room which introduced its center. It was the suburbs before there were suburbs. us to it, first under the care of our laundering mothers. Decorative wrought-iron gratings and balconies on And in some of those hose-receiving sinks, there the lower-floors, red tile roofs, deep window-niches occasionally appeared giant spiders and centipedes; with semi-circular arches, and romantic modernist that was the scariest thing in that underworld, even brick motifs. to adult renters who dwelled cheek-by-mandible with And that was only outside. Inside, there were thousands of cockroach roommates, some small, and stippled hallways decorated with huge Moorish some very large. sideboards, their empty drawers littered with Down there were also the remnants of a ballroom; bubblegum wrappers, but smelling of exotic, ancient a large, empty space with a wooden, not cement, floor, worlds. And great armchairs of wood and leather in and a stage of sorts. Miss Haversham might have which no one ever sat. Each lobby had its own Otis waltzed there. Tennessee Williams. But no music hung elevator with art-nouveau button plates and wooden in the rafters, only the smell of dust and dankness. buttons, with elegant folding gates to be opened Those were the deep cellar haunts of the Alhambra, by hand to then exit through sliding doors. And, as the building itself haunted by refugees from Byzantium

7 Reminiscing and Nazism, from the Institution pogroms and quota had to be reached restrictions, from telephonically, while other neighborhoods Mrs. Melnick could that didn’t want be called in a more them, and would beat chummy, immediate their children up. fashion. Mrs. But that cellar Melnick, a secret was, in reality, only ally of my mother, the underworld of contactable at any the underworld. time? What could be Depending on the more sinister? floor you lived on, As I have there were varying indicated, we usually levels of upper went up and down (or underworlds beneath Alhambra Gardens Courtyard at least down) via the you. stairs, maneuvering We lived on the fourth floor: Apartment 4K (K for those slippery marble slabs with a variety of dance Kafka?). I never knew who lived in 1K, or 2K, but steps to an astonishing number of rhythms. Sometimes my whole family was certainly aware of who lived we slid down the bannisters. Why? For fun? Perhaps a in 3K, just below us. It was “Mrs. Melnick”. No first little. But mostly for fear that the elevator would stop name, no Mr. Melnick, no child or baby Melnicks, at Three! Yes, there were three other tenant families just “Mrs. Melnick”. She was the Baba Yaga of our on Three who might need the elevator. But what if lives, who dwelled, perhaps unimaginably, in a cave it were not they, but Mrs. Melnick? What if she got right below us, or perhaps in some other species of into the elevator with us; just the three of us, locked third-floor abode built on chicken feet, and sharing a into that tiny space together for however long the ceiling with our floor. descent? It sounds ridiculous now, but every time we Though we were obedient, well-behaved Jewish used the elevator we were deeply terrified as Three children, we did our share of running around the approached, and relieved of a hellish weight as it went apartment. And every now and then, the ominous by. Given how many times the encounter happened, I struck: a thumping, a banging, a knocking in the suppose repetitive relief was good for us, implanting floor; a threatening, fierce rebuke from Mrs. Melnick, an optimistic sense of recurring redemption. As the the “old witch” below, as she, what, beat the ceiling saying goes, banging your head on the wall is good with her broom handle (we imagined), protesting for you because it feels so nice when it stops. our peregrinations? As I write this now, I realize Yet it did happen. Only once that I recall, once I don’t actually know how she knocked, or with in ten years. The elevator stopped at Three, and Mrs. what implement. A broom handle would be a tool Melnick got in. It may have been the only time we befitting a witch. But a broom handle banging hard ever saw her. For all we knew, she had three heads several times a day on a plaster ceiling? How long and the legs of a brontosaurus. But there she was, would the ceiling last? In any case, there it was, the Mrs. Melnick, getting into the elevator with us. How daily banging, dampening our play, and indicating a did we even know it was she? I don’t know. We just menacing presence, intimately lurking. knew. A heavy-set woman of fifty, in a filthy pink It was my parents who provided the label, and for quilted bathrobe, wearing bedroom slippers, with us, the interpretation of “the old witch”. How dare curlers in her hair. She got in without acknowledging anyone threaten, even distantly, the creative play and us: perhaps she didn’t even see us. We backed silently exercise of their darling little boychicks? But listen: against the wall, and when the car stopped at “L” (for at the same time, my mother was not above using the “Lobby”), we oozed around her, opened the gate, slid old witch for her own nefarious ends. “If you don’t do the door open, and made a break for freedom. Mrs. what I tell you, I’m going to call Mrs. Melnick!” That Melnick continued silently down to “B”, to the dark, brought us into line, fast, though not quite as quickly labyrinthine basement, her natural abode. as her “I’m going to call the Institution” routine, which When we moved from the Alhambra, it was into a usually involved picking up the phone. Presumably, first-floor apartment in a new building directly across continued on page 12 8 Reminiscing In the Navy By H.P. Schroer, [email protected] Although at my age the synapses in my brain heads to determine the winner. Sadly, my musical misfire on occasions, the pictures from Steve Samtur’s career ended there. “The Bronx: The Way It Was” presentation brought Jack, while not a winner in the Frank Sinatra these memories back into focus. contest, went on to become a successful classical On September 11th, 1926, after a whack on my and Broadway musical composer and producer. He backside, I first opened my eyes to see and smell the wrote and directed the musical version of Ginger aroma of the beautiful Bronx. I lived there for over 30 Man, a book written by the Irish expatriate writer years, only leaving for 2 ½ years when my best friend Patty Dunleavy, a boyhood friend who grew up in the and high school fraternity brother Jack Duffy (Omega Woodlawn section of The Bronx. Jack’s music can Gamma Delta, Evander Childs High School 1943) also be heard at the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. and I enlisted in the Navy in February of 1944. At an early age, we moved to Knapp Street in Jack and I applied for a job as ushers at the Loew’s the Eastchester Road section of The Bronx, where Paradise Theater. It was a magical place. The Co-Op City is located. The area was swampland and shining, sparkling stars our favorite location on its ceiling created for crabbing. In 1930, the perfect setting for we moved to 4322 De the audience’s shock Reimer Avenue, where when Clark Gable I attended P.S. 87 on said to Vivien Leigh, Bussing Avenue. We “Frankly, Scarlet, I were in the midst of don’t give a damn.” the Depression, and The audience was held the availability of spellbound by the use food and the cost of of the word “damn”. housing was always The sound rippled a problem. We had a through like a wave at garden in our backyard Orchard Beach. This, where we grew our along with the term own vegetables. To “nerts”, was sufficient accommodate the enough for my mother addition of my new to wash my mouth sister, we took in a out with Kirkman boarder, known to us as soap. What do today’s Uncle Ernie. He was a mothers use? fire lieutenant with the Failing to get the NY Fire Dept. Since ushers’ job at Loew’s, 4322 De Reimer Avenue Uncle Ernie had his we applied and were successful in becoming Soda own bedroom, my brother and I shared a bed in the Jerks at Krum’s across the street. Also a magical remaining small bedroom. place. Our career was short-lived, when the store Speaking of sharing: My brother was rather short, manager noticed that we didn’t charge some fraternity and it took him a while to grow tall enough to go from brothers for the famous Krum’s ice cream sundaes. knickers to long pants. In the meanwhile, my body Jack and I, as part of our fraternity initiation ritual, hormones were kicking in, and in order for me to go were required to enter a Frank Sinatra contest at the from shorts to knickers, I had to wait for my brother RKO Chester on Tremont Avenue and Boston Post to outgrow his knickers. This meant that I was still Road. I sang the popular ballad, “Pistol Packing wearing shorts when my contemporaries were in Mamma”, and Jack sang “Paper Doll”, a song made knickers. My masculinity was brought into question popular by the Mills Brothers. A bevy of fraternity every time we moved to a new neighborhood. So, of brothers sat in the front row, cheering and jeering us necessity, I became a pretty good street fighter. when the theater manager placed his hand above our When we moved from De Reimer Avenue to 4349

9 Reminiscing

Brunner Avenue, I had not seen in over I was immediately six years. While on called a sissy by leave, the crew I was Rudy Santabello, assigned to went to one of the kids in California and on to the neighborhood. A the Pacific. During fight ensued. As was this period, President the usual case when Harry Truman I won, my pugilistic dropped the atomic counterpart became bomb and the war my best friend. This soon ended. When held true with Rudy. I got to California, Although we there was no need drifted apart over for me to go to the the years, our 4349 Bruner Avenue Pacific, so I broke a acquaintanceship was renewed when my daughter cardinal rule by volunteering for Shore Patrol in my and I opened a store on Hughes Avenue in the Arthur home naval district, New York City. Avenue section of The Bronx, diagonally across You have to understand, I was 17 when I joined from Addeo Bakery. It was here we produced our the Navy, and a wise-ass kid from The Bronx who was “Cheeches”, a cheesy version of a quiche. As fate known to his Navy buddies as H.P. This was a name would have it, Rudy owned the social club on the given to me during a training mission, in which we corner, as well as the local linoleum store, a thriving were given basic instructions on how to fly the plane business. The Con Ed electric meter for both our store in case the pilot or copilot was injured. I decided to put and the social club was located in our store’s basement. the plane into a dive, scaring the hell out of everyone, Needless to say, Con Ed shareholders’ income was including myself. While my given name was Harold impacted by this location. Peter Schroer, from that point on I was called H.P., After graduating from P.S. 87, I attended P.S. 113 for “Hot Pilot”, a name still used during my present on Barnes Avenue. While the cost for the subway was Veteran Advocacy work. only a nickel, we saved ten cents by walking to school. Getting back to my volunteering for Shore Patrol. It was over a mile each way. The 10 cents saved was When the Lt. reviewed my application and noticed the used to purchase tickets at the local movies. number of Captain’s Masts I’d accumulated during After P.S. 113, I passed the entrance exam and was my brief naval career, he commented: “How can you accepted to the Bronx High School of Science, which expect me to approve your application? You can’t at the time was located on Creston Avenue behind the keep yourself out of trouble. Why do you think you Loew’s Paradise. I had always been considered an can prevent others from getting into trouble?” above-average student, but my experience at Science I explained, “That’s exactly why. I knew what it proved otherwise. I had difficulty getting grades above would take for them to get into trouble, and therefore a C. Being 13 and with my hormones in a frenzy while could tell them how to avoid it.” attending the all-boys’ Science High School, I decided I’ll never forget what happened next. The Lt. put to transfer to the co-ed Evander Childs High School his arm on my shoulder and said, “Son, I am going to in 1941. After graduating, I enlisted in the Navy in recommend you for Shore Patrol. My advice to you February of 1944. for the future, ‘Go into sales’.” I heeded that advice I served as an Aviation Radio Gunner 3 Class and spent over 40 years in the marketing and selling of during World War II. During our training on PBY consumer products. I was instrumental in introducing aircraft at the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Halls cough drops to the American market. Florida, we used to fly anti-submarine patrol in the As a closing note, while on Shore Patrol duty in Caribbean, as well as track hurricanes. When the war New York City during 1945-46, I lived at home in The in Europe was drawing to a close, we were sent to Bronx and commuted to Manhattan via the subway. Hutchinson, Kansas for training on the Navy version One of the areas I was assigned to patrol was the area of the B-24. We were being trained for the invasion known as Swing Street. This was the area on 52nd of Japan. Street between 5th Avenue and 6th Avenue. Before I was given a special leave to see my brother, who going into service, Jack Duffy and I used to use our

continued on page 24 10 Reminiscing The Scent of Fear By Hank Pollard, [email protected] I remember what happened so well because it was occasionally by a boarder. It had a window onto the the day before my eighth birthday. We were living in fire escape, and below were a vacant lot and an alley a second-floor apartment in the East Bronx at 1819 leading to the street. Clinton Avenue. My parents were visiting friends The scraping sound came again. It sounded as that evening, and my if the window to the brother, who was nine fire escape was being years older, was out opened. This window on a date. It was not was not always locked. unusual for me to be The fire escape was home alone at night. I used to store things, listened to my favorite and I would sometimes radio programs, which sit out there, reading that night were “The or doing homework. Lone Ranger”, “Mr. I then heard footsteps District Attorney”, “I slowly moving through Love a Mystery”, and the apartment, and “The Eddie Cantor closets and drawers Show”. opening. A horrifying Before going to realization struck me: bed, I fixed myself a someone had come snack: a thick slice of into the apartment pumpernickel bread through the fire escape slathered with schmaltz window! (chicken fat), heavily I was rigid with salted, accompanied fear. I stifled a scream. by a generous slice My legs shook of raw onion. After 1819 Clinton Avenue uncontrollably and brushing my teeth perspiration soaked (twice because of the snack), I read comic books in my pajamas. I had never been so frightened. I thought bed until I got sleepy, then turned off the light and fell of running out the front door but doubted my legs asleep almost immediately. would support me even if I mustered the courage to I was awakened not long after falling asleep. I flee. In a panic, I slid off the bed, pulling the blanket knew it was not very late because my brother was with me, and crawled under. I lay with my eyes shut not in his bed across the room. What had awakened tight, my head under the blanket. Though I tried to me was a scraping sound coming from the other quiet the sound, my breathing roared in my ears. I end of the apartment. I was usually a sound sleeper; was really scared. I prayed to hear my parents or my sometimes my parents found me asleep on the floor in brother coming through the front door. the morning after rolling off the bed. But this night, I I heard more footsteps, now outside my door, awoke instantly. I sat up, listening intently, staring at which slowly came into the room. I panted with fear. I the open door of my bedroom. felt dampness beneath me: I had peed in my pajamas. Our apartment was a “railroad flat”, meaning that I heard movement near my bed, and then my closet all rooms were off a hallway running from one end opening. I held my breath and vainly tried to control to the other. My parents’ bedroom was next to the my quivering limbs. My heart pounded. I lay there, front door and looked down on the street. Next was petrified, expecting at any moment to see a hand reach the bedroom I shared with my brother. Then came the under the bed, rip the blanket away, and drag me out. living room, the single bathroom, the kitchen, and a Then I heard footsteps leaving the room. Then small bedroom at the far end. This room had been silence. I lay in my wetness, stone still, barely previously occupied by my grandmother, and then breathing. It felt like I stayed there for hours. At some

11 Reminiscing point, I fell asleep. The next thing I remember is being awakened by bright lights, my parents’ excited voices, and being pulled out from under the bed. They had come home and found the house in disarray, the fire escape window open, and me asleep under the bed in damp pajamas. An inspection disclosed that a portable radio, some of my mother’s costume jewelry, and my father’s toolbox had been taken. On the kitchen table were the jar of chicken fat, now empty, and a remnant of the onion. The pumpernickel bread was gone. Apparently, the intruder had fixed himself a snack. In later years, it occurred to me that the intruder could have been tracked down by his scent.

I think I saw her once as an adult, in a supermarket The Underworld on White Plains Road, on the other side of the parkway. An old woman crossed my path who slipped neatly into the image graven in my childhood memory. Knocks at the This time, she had on a soiled overcoat, black shoes, and a babushka. She shuffled in the same way. She Alhambra looked mirthless, and mean. I almost accosted her, (continued from page 8) but I didn’t. What would I have said? I suppose I was still afraid. Maybe it wasn’t Mrs. Melnick. But maybe it was. from the schoolyard of P.S. 105. There was no more Mrs. Melnick. There was no possible Mrs. Melnick substitution or replacement; under us there was only a garage. The world was a better place, though not as elegant. Who was Mrs. Melnick? What was her life? Did she have a family? What did she do for work? Why did she go out so rarely that our nightmare encounter happened only once in ten years? One might ask the same questions about God. I realize now she was just as mysterious. White Plains Road 12 Reminiscing The Bronx I Grew Up In By Morton Newman, [email protected] I was born in Bronx Hospital in 1942. My parents two brothers lived with their parents in a ground-floor were living at 1083 Longfellow Avenue, between apartment at 1099 Longfellow Avenue. Our side of East 165th Street and Westchester Avenue, and I Longfellow Avenue was two blocks in length, with lived there with them until they moved to 172nd Street so many kids that it took a long time to make friends and the Grand Concourse when I was 16. “up the street”. The neighborhood was a typical working- As was typical in those days, the girls got married class neighborhood of the young in order to get out time period. Rent control of the house and live in a allowed people to stay saner, more comfortable in affordable housing for environment. many years, and there The neighborhood was were often two or three considered integrated in generations of a family in the ‘40s and early ‘50s, as the neighborhood. it was primarily a mix of The neighborhood Irish, Italian, and Jewish provided everything (with a few Cubans and we needed: schools; Puerto Ricans), as opposed Siegelstein’s Grocery to areas like Fordham Store across the street; (Irish), Allerton Avenue/ Applebaum’s Candy Belmont (Italian), Fox Store on the corner; a dry Street and Hunts Point cleaner on the other corner; (Puerto Rican and African and a drug store down the American), and Pelham block. Around the corner Parkway (Jewish), which was a poolroom, an auto were seen, at least by us, repair shop (where the as overwhelmingly one local bookie set up shop), grouping or another. and a pizza parlor. It was 1083 Longfellow Avenue When African two blocks to the subway station for one line and Americans and Puerto Ricans moved into the five blocks to the subway station by Fox Street for neighborhoods in the mid-‘50s, some white people another line. began moving out. My parents never had a car because the insurance The neighbors were almost always a community of was too expensive, and you had to move the car every shared interests and concerns. I remember a time in the day since the street sweeping schedule mandated early 1950s when the milk men were on strike. One of “alternate street parking”. The subways, buses, and our close friends and neighbors, Sidney Maged, was a cabs were more than enough to get us anywhere in milk delivery guy. He brought a truckload of milk to the city cheaply. the neighborhood so people would have enough milk During those years, I went to the neighborhood during the strike. schools: P.S. 75 near Hunts Point, and David My years on Longfellow Avenue were filled with Farragut Junior High School 44, which had a stickball and basketball. We used to play basketball on program that allowed me to do the 6th, 7th, and 8th the outdoor asphalt courts of the local playgrounds or grades in two years. This effectively made me the in P.S. 75. I remember several times when we swept youngest student throughout each of my high school the snow from the outdoor courts so that we could play grades. I didn’t go to the neighborhood high school, basketball during the winter. I don’t remember ever James Monroe, but rather graduated from Stuyvesant playing basketball indoors in The Bronx. H.S. in June of 1959 at the age of 16, then started at We played stickball on Lowell Street, which was Hunter College the week of my 17th birthday. perpendicular to Longfellow Avenue. We would hit My closest friend growing up (and still to this uphill from the railroad tracks, and a homerun would day) was Neil Goldstein. He and his five sisters and have to travel up the hill, cross Longfellow Avenue,

13 Reminiscing and go over the five-story roof of 1083 and 1091 family financially, plus he would send me home with Longfellow Avenue. The neighborhood team would a big package of goods from the store. His clients frequently play teams from other neighborhoods; often sent their chauffeurs to pick up packages. When I games both on Longfellow and on the other teams’ would ride the subway home after working in the store streets. For working-class neighborhoods like ours, all day Saturday, I would usually be able to get a seat, it was amazing to see thanks to the smell of the amount of money fish on my clothes. players and parents When we moved to would put up in bets the Grand Concourse against the other teams. apartment, which When I was 12, was on the 5th floor, our neighborhood team my friend Neil from was recruited to play in Longfellow Avenue the PAL for our local came to visit; his sister precinct. This was the and her husband lived first time any of us had in the same building uniforms and, more on the first floor. We importantly, the first went out with her time any of us ever husband Mark to the played on a dirt-and- local poolroom. Mark grass field. We had was a bodybuilder and always played in the worked in construction. streets or the asphalt of He had broken his hand the P.S. 75 schoolyard. in an accident at work The difference struck and wore a cast on his home immediately. right hand. At the first practice, While we were one of our guys tried to playing pool, a drunk demonstrate how to started hassling Mark slide on dirt, and his P.S. 75, 1999 and eventually started a cleats caught and he broke his ankle. Despite that fight. Mark did his best to just hold him so he wouldn’t awkward start, we did manage to play well, and we injure his hand, but the drunk broke free and started even won the Bronx Championship that year, though swinging a pool cue at everyone. I apparently got hit we lost in the citywide tournament. As an aside, but a but didn’t notice it until after we left the poolroom. commentary on the reality of our neighborhood world, During the course of the fighting, I hit the drunk with one of our teammates died of a heroin overdose shortly a full swing of the pool cue, and he didn’t even blink. after the PAL season was over. He was 13. I realized it was time to bail and, coincidentally, we I eventually played baseball at Hunter College heard the police sirens coming. for a couple of years. Two of the players on our team When we finally got outside and away from the were drafted by Major League teams. The money they poolroom, I realized that my head was bleeding, so apparently received, in those days, was impressive. we went to the ER at Mt. Eden Hospital to get some John Branchiforte was a shortstop, drafted by The stitches. Arriving home, my mother started to question Dodgers. He made it to 3A but apparently hurt his why we had moved from the poorer neighborhood on leg playing flag football and never made it to the Longfellow Avenue to the “nice” neighborhood on Majors. Larry Yellen was a terrific pitcher who was the Grand Concourse. drafted by the Colt 45s (now the Houston Astros) and I left The Bronx the week of my 21st birthday. got a $75,000 signing bonus. He was brought up to My friend Neil and I left on a boat for Genoa, Italy, the Majors too quickly and was burnt out after a few intending to spend a couple of years working our way short years. around Europe. We lasted a year, until the Draft Board When I was 13, I worked in my uncle’s store, realized that we weren’t enrolled in school and invited Murray’s Sturgeon Shop, on 89th and Broadway, on us to become part of the Vietnam War. Saturdays. This was my uncle’s effort to help our And that’s The Bronx I grew up in.

14 Reminiscing My Early Jobs By Nathan Reiss, [email protected] As a child, I lived two blocks from Yankee street, except that instead of carrying bags of food, Stadium. It was, and still is, a source of jobs for the I was now carrying clothes. Jack was always a very local people. My friend Howie and I discovered this decent person, but jumpy and nervous, most likely at about age nine, when we began by opening doors because of what he had to undergo during the Nazi for people who were arriving in taxis. era. People who came into his store About two years later, an older boy frequently argued with him about the who I knew from our neighborhood tiniest glitch in the clothes that he had asked me if I would help him to sell returned to them. He always worked Who’s Who in Baseball books around very hard to satisfy his customers. It Yankee Stadium. He would give me seemed clear that they were taking a profit from each book that I sold. advantage of him. After about a year, He also taught me how to advertise I was no longer able to continue the books by shouting: “Hair Ya Are! working there, due to my growing Getcher Who’s Who in Baseball Hair! school requirements. Pitshers, Stawries, Rekuds of Awl da When I reached age 18, I began to Major League Bawl Playahs!” work at a full-time summer job, just In the next season, I noticed that, across the river from The Bronx, on around the Stadium, there was a Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan. It group of middle-aged men who were was a very small sheet-metal shop. selling ice cream from small pushcart My job there was to operate a device wagons. I saw that they were coming for bending large pieces of metal out of a small store about two blocks away from the sheets. It wasn’t a particularly difficult job, and it was Stadium. I looked into the door and saw that it was the somewhat boring. The several other workers in the source of the ice cream wagons. I figured that I could shop didn’t speak much English. give it a try. They lent me a wagon, and I quickly found The large 4’x8’ sheets were stacked on an area that this would bring in more cash than Who’s Who in attached about a foot from the ceiling of the store, Baseball. I tried it for a few days, but I suddenly found about six or seven feet above the floor. At one point, myself being pushed and kicked around by the other I was asked to pull down one of the sheets. No one ice cream guys. They were much older than me, and thought to tell me how to do that. The sheets were it was clear that I was stepping into their territory. I all covered lightly with oil. I guess that I must have decided that it would be best not to continue with this. jumped up to grasp or drag it, so that I could bring it When I was around age 14, my mother asked down. The sheet started to slip down on its own, its the owner of a small nearby food store if they could front edge heading straight toward my face! I quickly give me a job there. He hired me as a delivery boy, raised both of my arms to prevent that from happening. bringing food packages that had been ordered in the Instead, I wound up with a deep gash on one of my neighborhood. The distances were no more than about arms. At the end of the summer, I was glad to get back two or three blocks away. Sometimes I carried a single to my school activities. bag by hand, and other times I would carry a number The following year, my father, who worked in of orders in a three-wheel wagon. I don’t remember a meatpacking plant, suggested that I might be able how much the owner paid me. It was something like to get a summer job there. The company had two a dime or a quarter per delivery. In addition, I usually locations: one in Brooklyn, where my father worked, got similar tips from the recipients. and one in the Harlem section of Manhattan. I obtained A year or so later, I was hired by the owner of a the job in Harlem, not far from where we lived in the small cleaning and tailoring shop, across the street South Bronx. It was a pretty good job; mostly packing from where I had been working. The owner, Jack large boxes of wrapped meat items, and getting the (aka Jacob), was a European immigrant, who a boxes onto trucks. few years earlier had been in a Nazi concentration After a few weeks, I was transferred to another part camp. My job there was similar to the one across the of the building. I was now working where frozen meat

continued on page 18 15 Reminiscing

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17 Reminiscing

My Early Jobs our store, we had created the correct sizes and shapes (continued from page 15) that were needed, and we finished the job very quickly. I really enjoyed being able to help in removing was brought in double-sized bathtubs on wheels, with something rotten, and turning it into something that an open pipe on the bottom. The meat was brought in, turned out to be pretty decent! and allowed to thaw, overnight, with the blood flowing Another interesting job involved a very large floor out through the hole onto a sloped floor, which allowed of a brand-new concrete building. We needed to create the blood to go down a drain. My job was to roll the a large number of U-shaped metal tracks, upon which full tubs to their required locations, and also to mop a large number of vertical partitions could be mounted away any leftover blood. and moved around. A ton of people were sitting all The next year, I returned to the same company, but over the place, clicking away at their typewriters. They in the Brooklyn plant. My job there included helping apparently had no idea what was about to happen. to remove frozen meat which arrived in railroad cars We arrived and laid the tracks onto the concrete just behind the building. This was difficult work floor, using gunpowder devices to shoot screws into because the meat was all frozen together and had to the concrete floor. Throughout the day, we added be pulled apart. On most days, I was at the head of tracks around each of the groups of people sitting at the meat’s travel line. My job there was to wash the typewriters. They must have been very aggravated. large chunk of meat at a sink, and then push it down At the end of the summer, I returned to school. By a slide to a row of other workers, who did the cutting the beginning of the next school year, I had already and government stamping, etc. become deeply interested in science and, particularly, The worst part of my job there was something that meteorology. I had earned some small jobs at CCNY, I had to do twice during my summer: the building had where I was now in my last year. what seemed to have been an elevator shaft at some My favorite job was to take care of the college’s time. In this case, it was being used to hang large weather equipment on the roof of the main building. pieces of meat, with a wood fire at the bottom. This Having been interested in electricity and electronics gave the meat a fine taste. Over a period of time, the for several years, I was amazed that devices on the inside of the shaft walls would become a gooey mess. roof required daily attention. I was certain that all of A helper and I were given raincoats and hats, and hot those rooftop devices could be connected via electrical power hoses to clean the shaft. This job lasted several routes to the Meteorology Department downstairs. hours and had to be done at nighttime, so as not to Unfortunately, I never got far enough to make it all disturb the daytime work. The worst part was getting work, but I had a good time trying! back to The Bronx on the subway. I smelled awful! In addition to the meteorological work, I had a People on the subway were clearly staying far away job with the Geology Department, which operated a from me. device for finding earthquakes and other geological I found my first do-it-yourself summer job by activities. My job consisted of snapping pictures of going to Warren Street, a section in lower Manhattan, the readings in the basement of the building. where there were lots of tiny offices with windows My very last job while finishing CCNY was plastered with possibilities of job offers. I went into at Muzak Corporation. A friend of mine who had one of the offices and told them that I was interested worked there had become ill, and due to my amateur in just about anything. They made a phone call and radio documents, I was able to substitute for him for gave me an address. It was yet another sheet-metal a couple of months. Muzak transmits music and other business, located in lower Manhattan. Their operation information to specific audiences. My evening job consisted of cutting and bending sheet-metal into there, after all the other technicians had gone home, various sizes and shapes, as needed for their clients. I was to carefully watch the various transmissions that quickly learned how to use their mechanical devices, were going out, to change audio tapes, to answer and prevent my fingers from being chopped off. phone calls from people who wanted to hear a After a few days, I went along on a truck with particular musical item, etc. I was able to complete my two other workers. Our job was in the basement of a homework while doing this. Very convenient! very old building. It had a small group of toilet seats Having made my way through all of these jobs, I that were separated by wooden walls, which were no then decided to try something completely different: I longer allowed in New York bathrooms. The toilet joined the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam era, and seats now had to be separated by metallic walls. In after a four-year term, finished as a Captain.

18 Reminiscing The 1954 Lo-Jinx Softball League By Mike Levin, [email protected]

At the ages of 16 and 17, in 1954, my friends and I were all seriously into softball. We lived in the West Bronx, in the area surrounding Harrison, University, and Tremont Avenues, the area monopolized by Macombs J.H.S. and its large schoolyard. We had all attended Macombs, were now in assorted high schools, and had developed our love for softball through the intramurals at Macombs, which were played in their huge cement schoolyard. Now in assorted high schools, but still living within a block or two of Macombs, my close friends and I were playing pickup games as a “team” in the Macombs schoolyard, both after school and on weekends. We decide to name our team “The Aces”, and we started looking for other semi-organized teams to play. It wasn’t easy, but we did find a little competition. However, after watching the Yankees, Dodgers, and

Giants play almost every day on TV on beautiful grass/ dirt fields in two organized Leagues, I began searching for more than what we had. Why couldn’t we play in an 8-team League for a championship, on grass/dirt fields? So I took my best friend, Hal Cohen, and we went up the street to the corner sports store, Lo-Jinx Sporting Goods, and spoke directly with their owner about: forming an 8-team softball League; playing a two-month schedule on public softball fields; purchasing team jackets, bats, balls, etc.; and calling it the “Lo-Jinx Softball League”. They instantly went for it, and the League was born. During that same meeting, we purchased a few bats and balls, ordered our specially-made team jackets, and promised to secure other teams to play, suggesting that they also purchase their team equipment from Lo-Jinx. Subsequently, several did. We were in business. We then found two older guys willing to umpire the games for a small salary. Hal and I then set out to find and secure seven other local teams for the

19 Reminiscing

League, and several other close friends and team field. I was ecstatic. Amazingly, both umpires, Irv members joined in the search. Amongst the foremost Raskin and Milt Stasiuk, showed up on time, and we were “Friend for My Entire Lifetime” Jerry Schnur, were ready to go! and close neighbor Stan Ginsberg. The League started, and summaries were published Scouring throughout my high school (Bronx in The Bronx Home News. I was in heaven! I could Science) and several others, as well as the immediate not believe that I was achieving this. neighborhood, we quickly found six interested teams, The Cobras walloped the Bombers, 12-6, in the and we then set everything in motion. first ever Lo-Jinx game. Ultimate League Batting Within a few weeks, I had obtained permits from Champion, Lew Egol, got three hits in five trips, Fred the Park Department to play, for the next two months, Altman tripled, and Art Siegel homered to lead the at Macombs Dam Park (grass/dirt softball fields). Cobras to the first League victory. Paul Bank hit the And, on April 11th, 1954, “The Lo-Jinx League” only round-tripper for the losing Bombers. became real and functioning. In the second game of Day 1, the Cyclones and X’s Hal and I approached April 11th with much also played a 12-6 game, with the Cyclones winning. trepidation. We had purposely not scheduled the Lloyd Siegel and Hal Deutschman both homered for Aces for the first group of games so that we could the winners. actively participate in starting off the other teams and Our team, the Aces, got to play their first game umpires, and making sure that there was no confusion the following week, against the League-leading or difficulty in using our Park Department permits to Cyclones. The latter scored three runs, but our Aces access the fields at the appointed times. were victorious, 10 to 3. Cohen and Kohn, Hal and Just before this, I had contacted the Sports Ronnie, both led the attack, with three hits each. Department of the NY Post/Bronx Home News Ronnie K’s three included a homerun, while Hal’s Edition and secured their agreement to publish short included a triple. summaries of each of our games, which I would write The season continued: it ran into May and then and submit. They certainly did follow through. We June, and everything was going great! Our team, the were hopeful that there would be no hitches in their Aces, was alternately in first and second Place. willingness to cover the games. And then, in June, the Panthers beat us 6-2 in a They did not disappoint us. Before our first game playoff game. Ivan Goodman and Stan Friedlander started, they featured a story: “The Lo-Jinx League led the Panthers’ attack, with three hits each. Ivan’s is Starting Play Today”. The article was being read in included a triple, and Stan’s a double. Goodman the newspaper as the Cobras and Bombers took the knocked in two runs. Pitcher Jerry Waller and

continued on page 26 20 Reminiscing A Great Neighborhood By Susan (Stamm) Kaplowitz, Ed.D CPT, [email protected] I lived in the Bronx Zoo, either Northwest Section of with my friends or The Bronx growing my parents. Saturday up. My two addresses was children’s day, were 2749 Webb and it was free! Avenue and 2754 As a teenager and Claflin Avenue. I young adult, I got moved out of The on a bus or subway Bronx to New Jersey (all within walking in 1970 when I got distance) to go to married. I look back Orchard Beach or with great fondness Manhattan (which and nostalgia to all we called “the City”). the things this area In the City, I went to had, which made my the Wollman Rink, growing up so very 2754 Claflin Avenue walked up Fifth special. Avenue, went to the I lived about a block from a park, which every 42nd Street and Donellen Libraries, and ate at Horn & summer was my “summer camp” as well as my “go- Hardart. I would go with friends to Coney Island, get to” on most days. The Parkee would put out all the on the Kingsbridge Road D train and go to the last table games, carom (my forerunner to pool), etc., stop: Surf Avenue. One year when I was 13, I took my and in bad weather we would play in the Park House. brother (age 9) to the Brooklyn Paramount Theater to Living in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment on a block see one of Alan Freed’s shows. What adventures for without any trees, I loved what I thought was “the a young Bronx girl! country”, with all the grassy areas and the yellow My family loved sports. My Dad actually played flowers which I would pick for my Mom. I found softball into his 70s. He was the star player on the out much later that these “flowers” were actually Shore Haven team that played each weekend. I swam, dandelions, i.e., weeds. and played tennis and basketball. I put many miles on St. James Park was a short walk or a quick ride my English Racer, many of them biking around the on my bike, and where I went to play tennis. At Poe Reservoir. We attended many baseball games at either Park, I went to dances as a teenager. Van Cortlandt Yankee Stadium or the Polo Grounds. Park was a distance away, but either I biked there, And the restaurants! We took out or ate at the or I was driven when my parents finally got a car. I Towers, Leo’s Deli, and the Hebrew National Deli, played tennis and handball on the “wall”, and in the all on Kingsbridge Road. We ate Chinese food at winter, ice skated on the pond. Yee’s on Kingsbridge Road or at Hom and Hom I had a great education. I went to P.S. 86, John on Fordham Road (an extra walk for us). We would Peter Tetard J.H.S. (a brand-new school at the time), go to the Brighton Cafeteria on Fordham Road or and Walton High School. I went to Hunter College the 167th Street Cafeteria (a trip for us), where we in The Bronx (now called Lehman College). I needed would go down the food aisle and select the food, and no public transportation. I walked to each and every the server would give it to us and punch a ticket which one of these schools. we got when we entered. I walked to the Kingsbridge Movie Theatre on As for treats: we would eat (or bring home) the Jerome Avenue, sat in the children’s section, and most delicious pastries from Sutter’s; then there was kept my eyes out for the Matron, who walked around Zaro’s Bakery on Kingsbridge Road, and Philip’s to make sure that we were quiet. Bon Bons were Bakery on Sedgewick Avenue, which I would ride my favorite movie treat. When I got older, I would to on my bike and bring back jelly doughnuts for my walk to the Dale Theatre, the RKO, and the Loew’s family on Sunday mornings. It was worth it to walk to Paradise. Along with the movies, I loved to go to The Fordham Road to have delicious sundaes at Jahn’s

21 Reminiscing and Krum’s. our school supplies. It was not necessary to have a car to shop. For Years ago, I took my sons to show them the places I food, there was a small food market (Diatche’s), many lived, the schools I attended, the park where I hung out, fruit and vegetable stands, appetizing stores, and delis. etc. To them, these were just physical places. But to For clothing, a nice walk through St. James Park me, it brought back the wonderful childhood I’d had. would bring us right to Alexander’s on Fordham The expression “You can’t go back” is half Road. On the first day of school, my Mom, brother, true. You surely can, in your memories. I did, as I and I would line up to finally get into a very small remembered my great neighborhood in my mind and store, Shirley’s on Kingsbridge Road, to get all of heart, so many years later, and I always will.

Weatherproof when we lowered our garbage down the dumbwaiter, and kept the boiler running, but the only encounters we kids had with this unshaven and bad-smelling man Halloween was being chased away from the stoop and yelled at (continued from page 4) to play in the Oval. We went gladly. We never considered the trick part of the equation. Other than scary places like the basement, and Why would anyone refuse us? Yet, the response to scary people like Barky and the Super, our building our door-knocking was not always welcoming or was a safe place to grow up. Holidays like Halloween positive, especially in apartments where no children were one means by which we kids were assimilated lived. Some elderly residents were Holocaust into American culture. What did first and second survivors. When they looked through the peep hole generation immigrant children learn? Collecting and saw a raucous gang outside, our knock might go coins for UNICEF presumably made us grateful that unanswered. Now, as an adult, I picture them turning we were in a position to give to charity, just as those off the lights and cowering in the closet. If they dared who preceded us to this country were its recipients. to open the door, we saw fear in their eyes. We didn’t We felt the relief of being like “them”, i.e., children understand what they were afraid of. How could we? from the dominant culture. The survivors we knew were silent about what they’d The Bronx was a cocoon which our grandparents been through; the word “Gestapo” was not part of their and parents didn’t have when they emigrated to escape children’s vocabulary. poverty, pogroms, and fascist regimes. Halloween, Other tenants were irascible and screamed at us to in particular, with its promise of sweets, was indeed “Get outta here!” or threatened, “I’ll give you what-for.” the American Dream. The streets weren’t paved with My next-door neighbor, an elderly Catholic widow, gold, but we got bags filled with candy. Children were smiled and gave us money, but no candy. Another free to attend what were then excellent public schools. woman gave us candy canes and colored sucking Families had the freedom to worship, even oddly, to candies that may have been left over from the previous celebrate holidays born of other religions, not out of year’s Christmas. A well-meaning Jewish neighbor, coercion, but by choice. who hadn’t been briefed on Halloween, might fish for Our self-contained apartment building protected us coins in a battered purse and offer us homemade babka from more than the vicissitudes of weather. It sheltered or a slice of honey cake. We’d decline, politely. As we us from the anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic abuse that got older, and our memories lasted from year to year, our grandparents and parents had endured. We were we learned to avoid risky or unproductive apartments. not aware, as the older generations undoubtedly One place we never visited was the Super’s were, that The Bronx and the greater metropolitan apartment in the basement. We avoided the basement area had places where Jews and Catholics were not period, whose point of entry was down an alley past permitted to live. We would all encounter overt and his door, unless we had to retrieve our bikes, which covert discrimination later in life, but in the bubble of fortunately were in a room close to the entrance, not our apartment building, we didn’t worry about who the dark, inner depths. Our parents whispered that the or what we were. Halloween proved that we could Super “drank” and warned us to keep out of his way. dress up, pretend to be rulers and champions, and be I suppose he unclogged drains, ran the incinerator rewarded merely for asking.

22 Reminiscing Big Stu By Harvey M. Abrams, [email protected] In my early years, I, along with my younger sister guys bothering you?” and my parents, lived in a beautiful courtyard building When the guys from the other team took one look on Wallace Avenue at the corner of Brady Avenue. at “Big Stu”, the group dissipated. Although the “safe” After I attended Kindergarten at P.S. 105, my father call stood, I was spared, and “Big Stu” had repaid me. decided to join his brother-in-law in a business in This reminds me of a short film which I saw Hialeah, Florida, and we moved. recently, in which a bear cub’s mother is shot by After a year, my father decided the drive-in hunters and the cub is left on his own. A cougar decided restaurant business he had joined was not for him, and that the cub would make a tasty meal and chased after we moved back to initially live with his parents (my him. The cub jumped on a log and was carried down- grandparents) on Bronx river, and the cougar Park East. I found followed. When the log myself way behind the got jammed, the cub class I joined in 1st grade jumped off and swam to at P.S. 105. The teacher the opposite shore, but took me under her wing the cougar followed him. and worked with me to It was about to attack the bring me up to par with scared and shivering cub, the class. when it looked up and About halfway stared at the cub’s father, through 1st grade, another who just happened to student joined our class, be there. The cougar and he, like I had been, slinked away, and the was way behind the class. cub was saved. After I The teacher assigned me was “saved” by “Big to work with him and Stu” so many years ago, bring him up to the level P.S. 105 I can certainly identify of where the class was. The student’s name was Stuart, with that cub! and because he was much bigger than the kids in the When I was in the fourth grade at P.S. 105, I began class, he was called “Big Stu”. I tutored him and it playing the trumpet and taking private lessons. By the went very well. 6th grade, I was 1st Trumpet in the school’s orchestra. As I went through subsequent grade levels, I Because Junior High School 135 was still being built lost track of Big Stu. When I was in 6th grade, I was when I graduated 6th grade, I had to take 7th grade at involved in a softball game in the schoolyard. I was P.S. 83 in the Morris Park section. To get there from playing 1st base when the ball was hit to me and the Pelham Parkway, I would have to take two buses player from the other team, who had been on 1st base, by transferring at the right angles where they crossed took off for 2nd base. I scooped up the ball and threw each other, or by walking the hypotenuse. Mostly, I it to second for what I thought would cause a force- walked to save time and carfare. out. The runner was called At P.S. 83, I played in both safe, and I put up a forceful the band and the orchestra. I argument that the runner joined up with a fellow a was out. few years older than me As I argued, I was whose father was a society surrounded by a bunch of orchestra leader, playing the guys from the other team, hotels downtown when he and it looked like I was wasn’t practicing being a going to get beat up. All of pharmacist. We played lots a sudden, there was a loud of gigs, like the new rock-n- voice from behind us, which roll dances, private parties, asked: “Harvey, are these and eventually, when he went P.S. 83 23 Reminiscing to Fordham University, the reunion parties of recent College on 23rd Street in Manhattan. I graduated with a graduates. B.B.A. degree, having majored in Accounting, became After one year at P.S. 83, I was able to go to 8th a CPA, and had a career in financial management. I grade at the new J.H.S. 135 across Pelham Parkway. had also resurrected my playing the trumpet much later There I was in both the band and the orchestra and, on and was accepted to play with some famous jazz because of my name, was listed first in the first musicians in New York City. I am now finally retired graduating class of J.H.S. 135! from my profession and my avocation. I then went on to Christopher Columbus High I still wonder whatever happened to my savior, School, where I joined the orchestra as 1st Trumpet. Big Stu. An assistant to the orchestra leader ran the school’s band and wanted to enlist me into the band as 1st Trumpet. That would mean giving up my lunch and study periods. I agreed, as long as I did not have to play and march in Manhattan on Columbus Day; but I said I would play in the band for all the school concerts. Graduation from Christopher Columbus was so huge that it could only be held at the Loew’s Paradise Theatre on the Grand Concourse. I can’t begin to count the number of times I played Pomp and Circumstance as the graduates marched down during the four years I played for the graduations. Finally, I too graduated and left school in The Bronx to attend Baruch Christopher Columbus High School

In the Navy Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, Louis Prima, and the incomparable Louis Armstrong, serving their famous (continued from page 10) dishes during the period when the Charleston and forged ID cards (we were 16 at the time) to visit the Lindy were popular dances. It was cool to be cool famous jazz clubs in the area. Swing Street was truly and to be invited to the back room, where weed was a gourmand’s musical feast. a cigarette and Lucky Strike green had gone to war. Though the vitality of the city is created by its A reefer was marijuana, and you delighted in inhaling occupants’ diversity of color as well as its physical both the swirling smoke and the beat of Swing Street, and cultural components, its heart and soul beats to whose cocktail of sex, booze, drugs, and music served the sound of music throughout its streets. While many as an inspiration to some, and demise of others. of its residents sleep, during the era of its popularity After getting discharged from service and with the “Swing Street” is awakened by the flashing colored aid of the GI Bill, I attended Long Island University in neon signs above. It plays its own melody and sings Downtown Brooklyn. I got married in my sophomore to its own tunes. The sandwich signs aligning the year and lived in a one-bedroom apartment at 650 East sidewalks provide menus to feed the crowds of music 231st Street. Our rent was $45 a month. gourmands, hustling to their favorite clubs: The While I have not lived in The Bronx for many Onyx, Three Deuces, and Jimmy Ryan’s. There were years, those cherished memories will always be part traveling chefs, including Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy of my DNA. And to this day, I still greet people with Hackett, Roy Eldridge, Fats Waller, Charlie Parker, “How ya doing!”

24 Reminiscing

Poe Park taking a walk to Fordham Road (a main Bronx shopping street), going to the movies, or hanging out (continued from page 1) at his friends’ homes. He was very sweet and very certainly part of the Poe Park experience. serious about me, although he was only 18. Jeff, on I was a regular attendee of the Poe Park concerts the other hand, was unpredictable. You never knew and hardly missed a Wednesday. It was the highlight of what he’d be up to. He was fun and free-wheeling, a my week. I could show off my latest fashions, usually real charmer. a dark skirt, fitted top, and silky neckerchief, chat with I dated both for a while, and when the time came my friends and share in some history by visiting Poe’s to bring a date to high school senior events, I realized house. My main goal, however, was to meet boys. The I had to make a choice. Both of them knew of each young men, from about 16-20, looked they were in other, since there were times both were in attendance a uniform, dressed alike in chinos and button-down at Poe Park. I mulled over what to do, and finally shirts. You never knew who would come up, ask you invited Jeff to attend events with me. to dance, and flirt with you. I stopped seeing Lenny, since I was so taken with The summer just before I turned sixteen and was Jeff. It soon became apparent to Lenny that I had entering high school as a senior, I met two promising chosen Jeff over him. Needless to say, Lenny was very guys: Jeff and Lenny. hurt. After I stopped taking his calls and making dates Jeff was the quintessential bad boy. He was good- with him, I received a letter, telling me that he had looking, with a wide swoop of blonde hair falling over been on the verge of picking out an engagement ring his forehead, twinkling blue eyes, and tall with a slim, for me. “You mean a lot to me, and I am very hurt.” mean, and lean physique. He dressed in more fitting I blew off his letter. In the first place, I was too clothes than the other boys, showing off his muscles. young to consider getting married. I had people to meet Jeff liked the ladies, and and places to go. I planned he also liked having fun. He to go to college and become flirted with me like crazy, a teacher. Marriage could and I was won over despite wait for years. I dismissed my fear that he could break him and made no attempt to my heart. Our dates were respond to his note. always fun because he was Jeff and I continued both a comedian and a tease. dating, until one day he He made me laugh. didn’t call. Back then, it was Although Jeff didn’t have the custom for a guy to call a car, someone in his crowd a girl, always. I waited and usually did, and we would waited, feeling heartbroken, drive up to Westchester knowing in my heart that County, just north of The he had moved on. Finally, Bronx, or out to City Island. Poe Park, 1938 I found the courage and Sometimes we’d go to Orchard Beach, the only called him. I wanted some answers. He was sweet sandy beach area fronting water in The Bronx. Other and charming, as he’d always been, but in essence, he dates included a subway ride downtown to Manhattan, confirmed that he’d moved on. He’d found a new lady where we would go to a concert or just hang out. and was now dating her. He said her name was Gail. One of the Wednesdays when Jeff wasn’t there, At first, I was devastated. They do say that time Lenny asked me to dance, and also did some serious heals, and in my case, it was true. After a while, both flirting with me. Lenny was tall and had olive skin; boys were a dim memory. Initially, I thought about he had very dark brown hair and eyes. He was almost calling Lenny, but decided that his ship had sailed. I the complete opposite of Jeff in looks and demeanor. went ahead with Plan A and attended the City College Lenny was a very serious guy. Although he wasn’t a of New York, where I met my husband in my freshman great student, he was determined to get an education, year. do well, and make it as a professional. He loved his I thought of both Jeff and Lenny over the ensuing family, even introduced me to his kid sister, and had years, wondering what had happened to them. Where a part-time job to help his family. Since Jeff wasn’t were they living? Did Jeff marry Gail? Did Lenny always available, I began dating Lenny too. make it through college? Of course, those years were Dates with Lenny consisted of going out for pizza, before the internet, so I had no way of knowing their

25 Reminiscing fates. sent to Viet Nam. I found that out because it said on After a while, I forgot all about them, until about Google that he had just attended a reunion for Viet five years ago. By then I was on Facebook and was also Nam vets. adept at googling. Neither man appeared on Facebook, I also learned that he is now on his second wife, but both names came up through a Google search. It a much younger lady. His first wife had made some surprised me how much you can find out. comments about what a creep he was. He was a This is what I learned. Lenny had gone to a charmer and player back in the sixties. I guess leopards community college and later moved on to a New don’t change their spots. York City College. He wound up going into retail as A photo of him at his daughter’s wedding popped a manager and then as an entrepreneur. He had gotten up on a photo album she shared. His blonde hair was married and now had two grown daughters, and three now gray, considerably thinner but still poufy. He grandchildren. And of all things, he had relocated and was no longer lean and mean; but was now paunchy lived in Dallas, Texas. I found a photo of his house on and plump. He looked tired and wasn’t smiling, even Zillow; very elegant. I couldn’t find a photo of him, though he was at a milestone event in his daughter’s but the one I found of his elder daughter looked just life. While his family still lived in New York, he and like him. The resemblance was striking. his new wife lived in a condo in Waikiki, where she Jeff had married a woman named Connie and was from. had two daughters. It appeared he’d attended college Life is like drawing without an eraser. It’s not briefly, but had to drop out when he was drafted and where you start, but where you wind up.

Lo-Jinx Softball (continued from page 20) shortstop Buddy Block had two hits each for the Aces, in the losing cause. It was bittersweet. We had lost, but we had won. Two-plus months competing against other teams in an organized League. Wow! We were happy, even in losing the Championship to the Panthers. The “Proud League Leaders” were Batting Champ Lew Egol (Cobras), who hit .444 and had twelve hits; Stan Friedlander (Panthers), who had eleven hits and led with three doubles; Art Siegel (Cobras), leading with two triples; and Friedlander again, with nine RBIs. Four players shared the Homerun Championship, with one each. They were Hal Cohen and Ronnie Kohn, both on my Aces, Jay Szuran of the Cobras, and the League’s Championship Pitcher, Jerry Lange (Panthers), who also led all pitchers with five wins and a 1.94 ERA. In early July, Hal and I presented trophies (purchased from Lo-Jinx Sporting Goods) to the Panthers and their League-leading pitcher, Jerry Lange, and to the League Batting Champion Lew Egol (recruited from B.H.S. Science), of the Cobras. That was truly a fabulous senior and junior year of high school for all of us. We really “hit it out of the park”!

26 Letters

Your alleys, the ice skating, the hills that let me have so Opportunity much fun with my bike, and the Woodlawn Jerome To line (#4) that was fun to ride. Yankee Stadium was ‘Sound Off’ a great experience too. Fordham Road has plenty of memories, as do other streets. Letters The Bronx in those days, including Parkchester, of course, was a civilization, rivaling that of Ancient To The Greece and Rome in greatness. All we have to do is look at the people who came out of it and who Editors grew up there (including us). That is why I go back to Parkchester, and certain other streets, every year. Home Sweet Home Ec. It is also why I leave that area, depressed, every year, as anyone who studied ancient history would about To the Editors: Athens and Rome. I enjoyed Marion Pollack’s story “Model One more thing: I never found out who the Apartment” in your recent issue. But I don’t think she beautiful blonde was who lived in the building did her Home Ec. class at P.S. 36. It is still located opposite 15 Marcy Place between Walton and Jerome (last I checked) at the intersection of Castle Hill Avenues. I never got to talk with her, but I realize Avenue and the Cross Bronx Expressway. I attended that today she is probably a grandmother, around 75- second through sixth grades there in the 1950s. 76 years old, and I am sure she doesn’t live in the As far as I remember, there was no eighth grade, same building. No complaints. nor shop classes for boys or Home Ec. classes for girls. These were in junior high school, and the one Jay Becker most pupils from P.S. 36 went to was Henry Hudson [email protected] Junior High School (J.H.S. 125), on Pugsley between Haviland and Watson. I attended seventh and ninth grades there, and I do remember taking a typing course (for which I am grateful to the present day). Quail Man Perhaps Ms. Pollack’s Home Ec. adventures took place there? To the Editors: I was born at Hunts Point Hospital on August 11th, Henry R. Cooper, Jr. 1938. I was blessed to be raised in a more gentle time Emeritus Professor, Indiana University in our nation’s history. As a child, my brother and I could walk to school (P.S.71) and even go home for lunch. It was after the Second World War, and times were good. Dad worked as a machinist at Sperry The Bronx Civilization Rand and mom kept our family home spotless. We lived downstairs in Grandpa Rizzo’s two-family To the Editors: home. I loved the outdoors even at an early age, as I truly enjoyed Steve Samtur’s presentation my dad loved to hunt and fish, and I yearned to go on Zoom of “The Bronx: The Way It Was”. It was too! a great presentation (thanks, Steve!) and it got After I graduated high school (DeWitt Clinton), my mind “mined”. I started thinking about what a I decided to enter the Air Force. I trained as an blessing it was to grow up in The Bronx of the ‘50s. Aircraft & Jet Engine Mechanic in Amarillo, Texas. It still lives within me. I started focusing on friends I was then assigned to the 49th Bomb Squadron in that I had, and girls I had dated just in the West Bronx Savannah, GA as an Assistant Crew Chief on B-47 only, for some reason. Even though I didn’t live there jet bombers. The B-47 was the Air Force’s first all-jet (my grandmother, two aunts, and an uncle did), I felt bomber, and it was state-of-the-art at that time. right at home. Under the command of General Curtis Le I also felt comfortable with the Fordham Roller May, “The Strategic Air Command” was the main Rink, Poe Park (where I met my wife), the 170th deterrent to keep Soviet Russia and China at bay. The Street tunnel under the Concourse, the bowling B-47, at its inception, did not even have defensive

27 Letters guns aboard, as there was no fighter in the world that Bronx Botany could catch it at the altitude it flew. It was called the Strato Bomber. To the Editors: Then, the Soviet’s Mig 17 came on the scene and By the age of ten or twelve, we could name our that all changed. As with the first of anything, the world: every street, train station, bus stop, candy aircraft was plagued with many problems, and as the store, ethnic church, ghetto, and gang, even the Cold War progressed, the tactics for deploying the individual drunks leaning on the lampposts outside bomber changed, employing methods and maneuvers the weathered doors of the dark bars. which structurally the aircraft was never designed to Urban kids with city smarts, we walked and went do. to sleep with the mental maps of the neighborhoods After the Air Force years, I fell in love and we needed to know, a kind of pre-adult cultural married the love of my life (as young men do), and competence that even our parents did not command we made our home in Savannah, GA. The outdoor or give us credit for, locked as they were in their life was available here, with abundant fishing and larger-yet-limited grown-up world of work and hunting opportunities. My father-in-law introduced home. me to quail hunting, and I acquired an English But for all our nuanced knowledge of people, Pointer. The breed scents game birds, and freezes up places, religions, and safe routes home, at that stage on “point” to indicate where the birds are. All of a of life our childhood botany was even simpler than sudden they flush, with as many as 15-20+ birds in what we knew of sexual anatomy: grass, bush, flower, the air. The flush comes with a loud sound of wings, and tree filled our total inventory of what grew in and if you let it, it can unnerve you. the local park: an egg-shaped former reservoir since I quickly became a conservationist hunter and filled in to make playgrounds, tennis courts, ball worked with many organizations, providing habitat fields, a quarter-mile track, and a circuit of benches. improvement and additional wild game food sources, There, in late afternoons at her favorite seat, I’d find nesting, and escape cover for the quail and other my grandmother to walk her home across the busy wildlife. road that ringed the park’s walls. In the heart, flanks, Whoever would have imagined a boy from The and curves of “The Oval”, the essential, but largely Bronx becoming the President of The Savannah unnoticed, plants served, for my friends and I, as Chapter of Quail Unlimited? A very southern backgrounds, pathways, frames, borders, or zones gentlemen’s sport, a gentleman farmer that grows that we hid behind, ran through, skirted around, Long Leaf Pine trees for future generations, and a rolled in, or climbed over. provider of wildlife food plots for all game and non- One day, a friend’s mother asked us, “What do game species. It has been a good life. you do for so many hours in that hedge, the one with I worked in the paper mills as a maintenance all the forsythia?” It had never occurred to me that supervisor, and coached Little League Baseball flowers had names, much less one that sounded like and Football with kids of all different races and the dark-eyed Italian girl in my sixth-grade class. backgrounds. Even now, I have to admit that when By full adolescence, running cross-country for they stop me in a store or in the street and show me my high school team, my terms for the landscape I their kids and families, I do cloud up a bit (the Lord jogged through were almost as elemental as those of put my bladder too close to my eyes). I do not get my elementary school days: meadows, hills, ditches, to go back to Pelham Bay as often as I did when I rock faces; these were the features that the course was younger, but I remember sitting on the stoop and snaked through at Van Cortlandt Park, the third watching the ducks fly south in the fall, thinking, largest in the city, an oasis from concrete canyons “They must know something I need to learn. Maybe and sweaty asphalt, with a long-forgotten African- I should follow them!” American burial ground itself buried somewhere among the woods and their other wounds. Anthony L. (Tony) Calandra Not much over five feet tall, with a short stride and [email protected] only a modicum of motivation, I never had a chance of placing well, much less winning, in a race, which was a relief before these events even started, as I saw

28 Letters the two-and-a-half miles ahead of me as an outing, trees, the angled, warm rocks of its thighs and groin, not a test; a half-day in urban country, far removed and for a brief score of breaths displace even lovely, from the moods and measures of my family’s tiny red-haired Roberta Nadel of Cruger Avenue from my apartment. I was happy to fill my lungs, feel my private realm of desire, letting the stony curves, the small body grow itself, taste the salt of exertion, and dust and dips and green scrim of the course take over know the ecstasy in exhaustion, a kind of sex for the the place where the poetry of those moments would soul, whose embrace made me cry in relief for the plant itself, where what had once been freedom’s onlyness of a long-distance runner, grateful for the backdrop now became its reason for being. solitude, and never lonely in the crowded field. At those times, I could step deeper into the pulsing Joel Savisinsky chambers of the park’s green heart, the arms of its [email protected]

COME BLOW YOUR HORN COME BLOW YOUR HORN Awards • Businesses• Volunteerism Accomplishments• Works In Progress Glen Joshpe, MD, Monroe ‘61, has published two new books available on Amazon. The first, Joshpe’s Journey: The Golden Years, includes humorous vignettes, essays, a play, short stories, and poems. The second volume is called Paintings from the Golden Years. For more information, contact the author at [email protected].

Born and raised in The Bronx, Joe Cirillo, “The Kid from A-hun Forty-Eight Street”, writes about his love of movies while growing up during the Great Depression and World War II, in his new book, entitled An Offer I Couldn’t Refuse: From the NYPD to Hollywood. The book has been receiving number positive reviews on Amazon and beyond. After serving in combat during the Korean War, he returned to The Bronx, married his fiancé, and served as a patrolman for 20 years in the NYPD. While a police officer, he befriended Producer/Director Mike Nichols, who made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: become an actor in the movies and fulfill his childhood dreams. Read about Cirillo’s early childhood and his relationships with many stars, including Frank Sinatra, Tom Hanks, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Sophia Loren, Jackie Gleason, Telly Savalas, and many more. The book is available on Amazon.

Being Brothers by Mike DeLucia is a multi-award winning novel which takes place in The Bronx in 1973. It’s the time of street games, riding bikes without helmets, drinking from hoses, and the wonderful world before cell phones. It explores family, friendship, and the profound impact of our past. It’s available on Amazon as paperback, eBook, and audiobook. Go to Amazon and search “Being Brothers by Mike DeLucia”. https://getbook.at/beingbrothers

29 Classified

DEADLINES for ad submissions are MP 9868 – Judy (Siegman) MP 9876 – Ann Progler – Lived in Mar. 15, June 15, Sept. 15, Dec. 15. Thorburn, Evander ’68 – Wanted! The Bronx, 1946-1956. Went to H.S. I am looking for a copy of the in Richmond Hill, Queens. Came back MP 9859 – DeWitt Clinton H.S. 1968 Evander Childs High School in 1962 and have been there since. Alumni: A 65-year reunion of the yearbook. I have checked numerous Would love to see old friends again. Class of 1957 is planned for May, websites, including classmates. Contact: [email protected]. 2022. Contact: com, eBay, and others, and nothing [email protected] for details. shows up as available for that year. MP 9877 – Susan Gilbert and her I am willing to pay a reasonable friend Leo Stadt, Mosholu Parkway, MP 9860 – Diane Kraemer, lived in amount for a reprint. Contact: J.H.S. 80 – Would love to hear from Yonkers but schooled in The Bronx, [email protected]. some beloved friends: Larry Blum, St. Barnabas Elementary School, Stan Newman, Rosalie Bronstein, Spellman ’69 – Looking for these MP 9869 – Shel Merr, Bronx Alan Rosenberg, Big Marty Newman, friends: Christine Iacobacci, Mary Community College ’70-’73 – If you Barry Spiegler, Georgia Korhan. Pia. Contact: [email protected]. hung out in the Puerto Rican corner Contact: [email protected]. of the Fordham Center lounge and MP 9861 – Joe Bales, Fordham & remember me, please write. Contact: MP 9878 – Philip Zimbardo, South Walton Avenues, P.S. 33, P.S. 79, Box 180, Carmel, NY, 10512. Bronx, East 151st Street, Southern Machine & Metal Trades ’56. Boulevard, Avenue St. John, P.S. Contact: [email protected]. MP 9870 – Larry Epstein – Looking 25, P.S. 52, Monroe ’50 – Looking for Alvin Appel & Eli Levine, or for any Monroe grads 1948-1951. MP 9862 – Marlene Spitz anybody who lived between 176th Contact: [email protected] or Silverstein, P.S. 109, P.S. 82, Taft Street & Tremont Avenue (1940s). 415-999-4998. ’67 – Looking forward to finding Contact: 386-931-7488. Joyce Falco, Murray Michaels. MP 9879 – Richard Wagner, 2821 Contact: [email protected]. MP 9871 – Norma Friedlander Briggs Avenue (corner of 197th Street), Gates, 1330 Intervale Avenue, P.S. Our Lady of Refuge – Looking for MP 9863 – Nora McCarten Cooper, 40, Monroe ’50 – Anyone still Richie Birch & Danielle Dwyer. 2430 Marion Avenue, Our Lady around? I now live in Newington Contact: [email protected]. of Mercy, St. Catherine Academy CT. Contact: 860-521-3000 or ’59 – Looking for Patricia Murphy. [email protected]. MP 9880 – Thomas Molnar, Contact: Kingsbridge and Van Cortlandt Park, [email protected]. MP 9872 – Linda Sussman (now P.S. 86, Tetard J.H.S. 143, DeWitt Linda Hunt Beckman), 2764 Creston Clinton ’75. Contact: MP 9864 – Dolly Powers Curtis, Avenue (197th Street), P.S. 46, E.B.B., [email protected], 201-522-9206. NYU ’66. Walton H.S. ‘59, Hunter College – Contact: [email protected]. Trying to find Carole Hamlin, Charlie MP 9881 – David Stolls, 1155 Gerard Perillo, Jaqueline Heller, Richard Avenue, P.S. 114, J.H.S. 22 (Jordan MP 9865 – Cliff Brenner, Mosholu Isaacson, Phyllis Altschuler, Lona Mott), Bronx H.S. of Science – Parkway & 204th Street, Grace Gilbert. Contact: Looking to find old acquaintances Lutheran School ’67 (2930 [email protected]. from my block on Gerard Avenue, Valentine Avenue) – Would like to as well as the guys by 1240 Walton share memories with fellow alumni. MP 9873 – Dorothy Zanelli, 1603 Avenue (where I spent most of my Contact: [email protected]. Hobart Avenue, P.S. 71 (1940-1953). days playing Johnny on the Pony, Contact: [email protected] or Stickball, and Touch Football right MP 9866 – Robert Wolchik, 817-744-7282. against Morrisania Hospital). Contact: Burke Avenue, Gun Hill Road area, [email protected]. Immaculate Conception, Mt. St. MP 9874 – Peter Bloch, J.H.S. 44, Michael ‘67 – Searching for Dennis Science ’62 – Let’s have a J.H.S. MP 9882 – Jocelyn Lewis-Evans, Urzo, Cary Soccia, Peter Milio. 44 Reunion (classes of 1950-1952)! Longfellow Avenue, P.S. 47, I.S. 84, Contact: [email protected]. Contact: [email protected] or Adlai E. Stevenson H.S. – Don’t 862-243-0225. have a specific person I’m looking for MP 9867 – Barbara Luna Johnson, because there were so many friends 2600 Creston Avenue, P.S. 46, P.S. MP 9875 – Charles Ludwin, (some I see on Facebook). Contact: 115, Science ’62 – Looking for 1675 Andrews Avenue, Macombs [email protected]. Eva Gottlieb (P.S. 115, M&A) and J.H.S., Taft ’59 – Looking for Julius Paulette Fialkoff (Science ’62). Simon, Jay Ashkenazy. Contact: Contact: [email protected]. [email protected].

30 From The Editors . . . Stephen M. Samtur Susan J. Samtur (continued from page 2) Stan Lee now has a street named after him in The Bronx, where he grew up. Lee received many awards and honors in his lifetime, and this one is extra special, as it not only honors the neighborhood Lee grew up in, but also the Marvel Universe he helped create. Lee is one of the most influential comic book creators of all time, having created the Marvel Universe that fans know 1720 University Avenue Stan Lee Way street sign and love today, and he sadly passed away on November 12th, 2018, at the age of 95. Two and a half years later, Stan’s hometown has named a street in his honor, and the city recently held a dedication ceremony. Named “Stan Lee Way”, the street is located on University Avenue between Brandt Place and West 176th Street. Lee attended DeWitt Clinton as a teenager, and it was there that his love of writing developed and was nurtured. Although he would spend his later years in Los Angeles, New York always held a place in Stan Lee’s heart. A good portion of the characters he helped create live in the Big Apple and help keep it safe. Naming a street after Stan makes sense, in light of his love of the city and his cultural contributions. Of the more than two million visitors who visit the Bronx Zoo each year, few pass through the gorgeous Art Deco Rainey Memorial Gates. Fewer still notice the plaque marking a “Fountain of Youth” located just down the path inside the gates, promising “good health and good fortune to all who drink there from,” attributed to an Italian legend. Is this a true holy grail, hidden in plain sight? Or is there more to the story? It seems an enterprising Bronx resident, Hyman Gould, returned home from a trip with a special souvenir, a 12-inch piece of lead pipe, which he was told came from an ancient fountain that granted all its drinkers good health, good looks, and good fortune. Working with The Bronx Chamber of Commerce and The Bronx Borough President, they concocted a tourist trap in the form of a drinking fountain Bronx Zoo’s to come and sip the rejuvenating waters springing from the Pompeii pipe. It seemed, Fountain of Youth in the end, that this tall tale never took off in the way Gould had hoped, and only Plaque the plaque remains to tell the story. However, The Bronx still attracts its fair share of concession-consuming visitors thanks to the beloved Bronx Zoo. It may be our region’s most-hated highway: The Cross- Bronx Expressway, considered by many to be an unhealthy scar on the landscape. Now, a proposal is gathering momentum to “cap” the highway, creating open space and parkland. Decking would cover the sunken roadway to create green space on top. Special vents would clean exhaust from vehicles on the newly-covered road. This has been done on a smaller scale in Dallas and elsewhere. At 2.5 miles, the Cross-Bronx proposal would be the biggest on the East Coast. Reimagining the Cross-Bronx Expressway decked over to create green spaces 31 Box 141 H, Scarsdale, NY 10583 Phone 914-592-1647 • Fax 914-725-2620 Change Service Requested READER REPLIES Is Your Mailing Label Correct? Is Your Mailing Label Correct? In order to keep our database current, please correct If you’re planning a move, please attach your label, cor- any errors and place the label and/or photocopy with rected with your new address and the date that you will corrections. begin receiving mail at that address. This will ensure that Account # High School Year Graduated you don’t miss your next issue of Back in THE BRONX. 56817 Roosevelt 1958 SNOWBIRDS – Change of address notices should be submit- Mary R. Flowers ted by Jan. 8, April 8, July 8, and Oct. 8 to ensure delivery to 123 Anystreet your correct address. S AMPLE­ Anywhere, USA 12345 (MAGAZINES ARE NOT FORWARDED.)

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